Prologue. Minigame (MPEx:S.MG) is now maintaining frozen copies of various linux distributions.i

Why would a private company involved in videogame development maintain frozen copies of OS distros ?

Consider the basic situation : a new user hears of Minigame's product, and wishes to try it. What do we do now ?

If the object were a physical item, such as a shovel, or a particular kind of dildo, the evident approach would be to describe the item. Whether stated in terms of materials, geometry, production process, however effectual and convenient, such description will suffice.ii

Intuitively this should work even better for abstract items, such as a computer program - describe it and you're done. So how shall we describe it ?

"Here's the source code, compile it and run it" is tempting, of course - if for no other reason, then because that's what "everyone does". This in turn because at some point illo tempore it actually worked, or at any rate worked well enough, or mostly worked or whatever it did. I have no idea, I wasn't there and didn't see it ever work.

For instance, "Eulora runs fine on Ubuntu". But what does this mean ?

I have a machine running Ubuntu 10.04. Eulora runs fine on this machine. According to "canonical", which isn't anybody, Ubuntu 10.04 is "no longer supported". What does this mean ?

It does not mean anything.

Meaningless as it is, in pratice it has nevertheless the effect that synaptic (which also isn't anythingiii) tells you that Firefox 20.0 is "the latest" version of Firefox (and if you delve into detail, it also tells you that Ubuntu repositories no longer existiv). This is especially funny in that Firefox 20.0v only handles TLS 1.0.vi

Confronted with this situation, I downloaded the latest firefox and

cp -rv * /usr/lib/firefox/

which resulted in a broken installation "that wouldn't start" (in human terms - that complained about missing gtk-3vii). So I checked to see which is the latest version of firefox that still uses gtk-2, downloaded that,

cp -rv * /usr/lib/firefox/

again and thereby obtained an installation of firefox that could use current ssl thus being able to read all (as opposed to most) https pages.

For the sake of fully understanding this preliminary example, test this on one of your own slavegirls. Give her a machine running Ubuntu 10.04 ; demonstrate to her that the firefox there current is not able to load a certain page ; explain to her why this is ; and task her to resolve the matter.

I am deeply curious whether your slavegirl can in fact resolve this.

If she can then she can certainly have those implants, and anything else she wants ; because she's one of those, readily worth thousands of Bitcoin on the auction block, except for the detail that no one owning one ever seems willing to part with her for any reason.

If she can not, she's just like everyone else, which is to say normal. And here's the strategic decision : does your notion of "publishing" go along the lines of gossipd, "only the qualified may meaningfully ever hear of this", or along the lines of signatures, "anyone should be able to do this" ?viii

If you decide to define "publish" correctly, then "a game publisher" is necessarily involved in an activity whereby the normal, and not the exceptional, can try out its published product.

Yet if your description of your product is "download the source, compile and run", you are implicitly importing in there the normal user's OS, whatever it may be.

This import is in no substantial way different from linking a library dynamicallyix : should it be changed later, by anyone for any reason, your program will receive the new functionality as it is rather than the functionality you yourself observed and tested against as it historically was.

This is the hole through which the night comes in. Small groups operating with little remanencex will be of course tempted to replace say [ with something carrying a viral payload - very deeply evident tampering. Large groups with significant expectations of remanence will however prefer much more subtle breakage.

Consider a very plainly evident example : once such a group managed to hijack the government and replace some portions of the definition of the workplace with nonsensexi, you were somehow burdened with an obligation to... upgrade! The "workplace" definition changed, and now your behaviour with regards to it has to change. There are numerous other examples - the definition of marriage for instance changes all the time ; and the definition of "owed" changes whenever convenient as well.

There is a lot of power in the ability to impose change, derived from the fact that as "revolution" is strictly running in a circle around a peg, then the sum over infinity of all the various discrete revolutions comes out as 0, yet throughout that infinity the "revolution" process spun someone's circle. The whole "progressive" nonsense is very strictly speaking an engine implemented out of chumps, and so yes it has a power rating as it generates work over time.

It then necessarily follows that in the quest to deny power to outsiders and maintain it for oneself, a company will opt to deny the possibility of change to nobodies, and invest resources into making this denial stick. So Minigame is maintaining frozen snapshots of historical linux distros, to deny random third parties the ability to force it to change ; and perhaps if needed to leverage this ability in order to force those third parties to change themselves.

Ideological History of the Republic.

[March 2013] A concise explanation of the functioning of inflation in socialism is unearthed. While in no sense novel, this snippet will nevertheless prove extremely influential in shaping Republican thinking for many years to come.

[March 2013] Some people discovered the soi-dissant "Bitcoin developers" are idiots. The unpleasant matter languished for many months in this stage.

[October 2013] Research into the strength of the RSA basis for Republican process begins. It will yield many interesting results over the years (Imperial attempts at unhappening it notwithstanding).

[October 2016] Evolving understanding of the problem of social hierarchy results in an unequivocal rejection of the humanity of common people.

Did I omit anything ?

———

Do you have any fucking idea how bloated these are, by the way ?

We are talking terrabytes of data here. Why ? Can you even vaguely guess what the fuck would be in Ubuntu that'd legitimately consume hundreds of Gigabytes of storage medium ?

A page is about 2k bytes, uncompressed. A book is about half a MB. A whole wall covered in shelves is a Gigabyte or maybe two if you have really long walls. Really, Ubuntu legitimately contains enough stuff to cover many hundreds of walls with shelves ?

Are you sure it's not just the necessary result of the ontological void screaming in the tiny empty skulls of a million pointless flies ? [↩]

The reader inhabituated with thinking in the proper sense, and habituated to instead substitute a mishmash of soundbites (obtained from "trusted"1 sources) may readily imagine that the solution would rather be an offer to "sell it to him".

This is nonsense, albeit satisfactory to a certain kind of narrowly minded self-interest known by idiots as "capitalism", which it pointedly isn't, and by everyone else as "ESLtard corporatism".

For one thing, I can't promise to continue delivering the product for as long as there may exist those who hear of it ; nor can I promise I'll be willing to send it to them wherever they may be. The former is a very marked problem with many items that actually matter (in stark contrast to the sorts of items that normally interest the sort of subhuman idiot we're here discussing, which are as an universal rule without known exceptions neither interesting nor important2). The latter might in principle fall foul of who knows what impedance mismatch3 between the communication of information and the communication of specified physical items.

For all sorts of reasons, some but not all of which have to do with the scandalously obscene imbecility of amoebas masquerading as human beings, you may discover at any point that "deliver an item" is a poor response to "state a question".

------1 Such as for instance from "the media", always understood as the government's agitprop machine exclusively ; such as from "community consensus" (aka fecal matter) ; such as from inept wordplay and so forth. The chief property of the Markov-chain based "thinker" is that his software is not verifiable in any objective sense ; but merely enacted through practice. Hence the subhumanity, not as an insult but as a cold, hard fact : it can not be said that his activity is either intentional or directed, making the average, hard-working, law-abiding, tax-paying, married-with-children citizen a sort of mollusc, not a sort of human. Hence the need of the idiot for the state : a super-entity to absorb and roll into one huge ball all the various (uncountable and subjectively impredictable) failures of the amoeba ; then "handle" them in bulk, which universally reduces to the emission of unbounded, unbacked promises as to the future (generally in the shape of fiat "currency" whenever available), promises that by definition and necessarily can't ever be satisfied.

2 The need for bell-bottom pants, smartphones, tamaguchi scl ends with the going out of the Kink High generation that thought it's swag. It's true that it was impossible to get laid properly without disco hair or a spoon for up your nose in the 70s. Nevertheless, their pointed absence today does not preclude anyone from getting laid (arguably - on the contrary). This is because the avatars of the idiot are irrelevant to the world, a mere coat of paint, entirely indifferent to the function of the painted thing. Meanwhile the need for a telescope is universal, and while the telescope may be superseded by better technology, the need for it never subsides. Should the new technology fail (such as for instance through a separation of domain from the old, that only becomes observable later ; or such as through failure of a production factor, that unexpectedly becomes unavailable) the telescope will be manufactured again as it was before. It will not however be needed again as it was needed before - it was needed throughout, and to the same degree. A man's education is not "needed now and again", but factually needed in everything he does, whether explicitly or implicitly, it's there ; and similarily items of interest, be they physical or ideal, are just as needed in their final implications, replacements, alternatives scl as they are in direct presence.

3 Consider the illustrative case of some idiots (who for reasons unknown, convincingly misrepresented themselves as "in charge") deciding "pgp is a munition and may not be exported". The "ban" (more properly speaking, the self-important aferations of irrelevant nobodies) were circumvented in fact, but the impedance mismatch is confirmed, not anulled through being resolved : there evidently was something there to resolve (which is, obviously, the main driving force pushing the subhuman amoeba in the way of actual people - it aims to exist through inconvenience). [↩]

Just for fun : if you remove all its built-in nonsense (which 404s because "canonical" deliberately deleted it all, in its doomed quest for relevancy) ; and then insert a broken line in the ppa list, it dies with a permanent

E: Malformed line 34 in source list /etc/apt/sources.list (dist parse)
E: The list of sources could not be read.
Go to the repository dialog to correct the problem.
E: _cache->open() failed, please report.

pop-up window. You can't however "go to the repository dialog", because synaptic closes immediately after you close the pop-up. So you can, with trivial effort, put the synaptic "easy to use" "GUI" "UX" "just like Windows" etc blabla into a smashed state from which it can not by itself recover.

This is the deep reason canonical isn't anybody : you can't become somebody by taking a tool, such as a piece of software, and painting over the seams so it no longer works. Very nice and a pat on your artistic head for the coat of paint, but no, your "artistic car" that has lost the use of the trunk is not a car anymore, nor useful. It's just a very large paperweight, of the exact same substance as those idiotic "gifts" you kept making for your mother during art class until you grew up enough to figure out that nobody wants chunks of clay or papier mache or whatever the fuck it was your daycare at the time pushed upon you.

None of this matters, of course, because nobody actually uses synaptic for any purpose that isn't "eee look what the Down's kids did, isn't it cute how they think they're part of this species" ; and even if someone somehow did use it, they'd still just nano /etc/apt/sources.list and fix it there directly. Which is the tautologic point : nobody uses the GUI/foreskin versions because a) they don't work1 and b) they aren't actually useful, or by their own lights (as seen in their non-working state) ever actually used by anyone.

------1 In this context "work" means reliably, in protocol rather than promise variant of reliably. Which is to say that it is not possible for them not to work ; rather than they mostly seem to generally work, more or less. [↩]

Does any software actually need 20 major revisions for any conceivable purpose ?

Quick likbez if you've not been following the "login state implemented over stateless protocol" lulzfest ongoing (for close to three decades now!) over at mongoloid "developer" farm : TLS was introduced because "SSL" (which is ambiguously a name for the protocol-nonsense as well as the nonsensical implementation thereof) v3 was utterly broken.

You understand what is being said here ? The third version of a thing built out of enough hubris to name itself the same as the thing it implemented was fundamentally and irreparably broken. Something like USG.Ford coming out with a car named Car 3.0, that fails to move on its own, and it is discovered that this is nothing short of a fundamental problem, for instance because the retarded islanders involved made the engine block out of pressed wood. And they painted it "metal". It looks just like an engine block, alright ? They got a little confused! And should that example be too wild for you to swallow, consider instead the actual lived case of USG.LM producing a "LCS" out of pressed shitboard.

So TLS was introduced, and guess what ? TLS 1.0 is fundamentally and irreparably broken. So you have to use TLS 1.2 or whatever now ; but the good news is that "online commerce" sites such as Paypal moved the deadline for the change : it was supposed to be this summer, but they moved it to Autumn 2017.

Who told this collection of fowl and cattle that they are people like you and me, and why did they ? [↩]

"GTK" is this other shambling horror we shan't discuss, other than to say there's absolutely no reason it needs major version revisions. The fact that it has three means it will never stop having them, and consequently that it fails at its only purpose in life. [↩]

This distinction figures prominently in the gossipd spec as well as discussion around it.

There are two fundamental modes of practical cryptography, one of them being "signature", as typified by deedbot, a situation where anybody can verify the truth of a sentence for the cost of a process ; the other of them being "gossip", as typified by the yet-inexistent gossipd, a situation where nobody can verify any truth, but merely allocate levels of trust.

These two modes are primitive - much like Bitcoin is the primitive of money - which is to say they are universally present in all fields whether the practitioners are theoretically advanced enough to recognize this or not yet (much in the way energy and mass are present in all physical interaction, whether the people involved are aware or not, and irrespective of what derivative nomenclatures they may be using).

It would stand to reason that only the first mode can be properly called "publishing". Tentatively, the second could be called "releasing", enacting both these terms into linguistic centrality, as they cover the most important distinction in extant human culture. [↩]

There's ample discussion re dynamic linking, and its practical problems as well as the political implications thereof which you are expected to be familiar with ; and which this article systematizes. [↩]

The term comes directly from the "memory" in game-theoretic modelling of interaction. If you are likely to run into the entity again, it has significant remanence in your system. [↩]

mircea_popescu funny how deeply aware they are of the power transactions occuring. as per the current kink high, "giving boy power" = bad ; but giving women very similar power over, eg, "whether fuck jokes are acceptable in the workplace" is doublespent as "fairness" or "equality" not as a power grab.mircea_popescu because hey, cheerleader suits have been around forever but boys still managed to control themselves ; whereas joking about coworker's boobs has not been around forever nor could anyone expect subhuman females to control self.

[...] of the first order, and all the attempts to paper over the fundamental idiocy of it to date have failed miserably ; they will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. [↩]It's unclear that users mean to [...]

[...] how broken the "convince a lord of this alt-republic" process is. [↩]Notwithstanding all the ridiculous kludge built around the attempt to pretend otherwise, credit card based ecommerce still happens in [...]

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